Category Archives: Culture

The Unconservatives

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The defining feature of Conservatism over the last quarter century or more is that it steadfastly refuses to consider the consequences of its dogma. In fact, part of its dogma is to reject any consideration of consequences. Conservatives proudly state that the means justifies the ends. If policy fits conservative ideology, then the results are by definition acceptable. You see that myopia at work in their latest fetish over zoning regulations in the suburbs and exurbs.

The American Conservative has been running posts like this one that claim the suburbs need to be exposed to predatory developers. The marketplace should decide if a chemical plant is built next to the school or a federally subsidized tenement is constructed in your town. After all, every conservative knows that the will of the marketplace is supreme. The only way for anything to be legitimate is if it is the result of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Of course, National Review has also jumped onto this fetish. This post from last month in response to the Trump administration trashing some Obama era housing regulations demands the suburbs be deregulated. He also makes the conservative case for exposing local communities to the whim of developers. The irony here is the author lives in one of the most regulated suburbs on the planet. In fact, Northern Virginia would not exist as it does if not for the federal government.

Like the fetish for legalizing drugs or hardcore pornography, conservatives first start their case by rejecting the obvious consequences. Any consideration of the knock-on effects of public policy violate conservative dogma. The only thing that can matter is if these proposed polices square with what passes for conservative theory. In this case it means zero government involvement in the regulation of development. Property owners can do whatever they like with their property.

Of course, at this stage, conservative theory is barely distinguishable from libertarian theory, which is nothing more than a pose. It is a way to stand on the sidelines and pretend to hold the moral high ground. In this case it means avoiding the real issue at play in this story. That is the systematic blockbusting of white suburbs by the Left through the use of federal housing regulations. They are trying to dump non-white populations into white suburbs in the name of retributive justice.

Rather than think about that, because that is scary and icky, the modern conservative focuses on the theoretical aspects of the issue. Like the reformer in Chesterton’s fence, they refuse to wonder why this is an issue. They refuse to ponder why the Obama people were doing what they were doing or why local communities have been fighting these efforts over the years. None of that matters. As is true with all ideologues, all that matters is the ideological conformity.

The irony here is that what passes for conservatism today is pretty much the opposite of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatism has always prized continuity, as that is the result of generations of trial and error. Change must come slowly and deliberately with proper consideration for local customs and concerns. Modern conservatism is the embrace of constant change, the whirlwind of the marketplace, in total disregard for community and custom.

Another part of that embrace of continuity is the point of Chesterton’s fence. The conservative not only knows there are consequences to every reform, but those consequences will have consequences as well. It’s not that the Right is adept at seeing the downstream consequences of the proposed reform, but that they know we cannot always see far enough downstream to truly know the second order effects of the proposed reform. Prudence is chief among virtues.

Getting back to housing policy, what we do know is the Left is not acting from republican virtue when they propose changes to the law. They are animated by anti-white hatred and the quest for retributive justice. That is the starting assumption when examining any proposed reform from the Left. Therefore, the conservative must look at how best to prevent the consequences the Left imagines. In this case, how best to prevent the Left from devastating the white suburbs.

As to the issue of property rights, this is another example of how modern conservatism is an inversion of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatives have always understood that rights are the product of human society. Citizens have rights and one cannot be a citizen unless they are part of a society. Therefore, the good of the community comes before the individual. This is why no right is absolute. There are always situations in which rights give way to the public good.

This is the case of local control of development. The people in the community live in the community, which means they live with the consequences of how members dispose of their property. They get a say in that. Ideally, this is a light touch that relies on the moral scruples of the community members, but when that fails, the collective good of the community must prevail. Further, the rights of the outsider, the developer, do not exist, because the developer lives outside the community.

It is popular to call the modern conservative controlled opposition. There is some truth to it for sure, as many are paid by left-wing media organizations. For most of them, they are just part of another tentacle of the managerial octopus. Some tentacles lash at the body of society, while others, like this one, try to cut off oxygen to the brains of otherwise conservative people. The hope is they will sacrifice themselves and their community in the name of abstract principles.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

American Pericles

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A popular topic among those less optimistic about the American Experiment is to compare America to Rome, either the republic or empire. The former camp looks for the Sulla in the past and the Caesar in the future. The latter camp looks for evidence that the American Empire is in its final days, like fifth century Rome. The trouble with comparing America to Rome is it is not a republic. It has not been since Gettysburg and is now something closer to a radical democracy.

The more accurate historical analogy for modern America is ancient Athens. While America is not quite yet a radical democracy, that is the current path. Soon the electoral college will be circumvented, so that presidents are elected directly. The Senate was democratized a century ago. The franchise is universal and will soon extend to anyone currently standing on American soil. The last ragged bits of republic will soon be gone and America will be a radical democracy.

Just as the wealthy and powerful in Athens assumed democracy worked best when they controlled it, the American oligarchs favor democracy because they believe it insulates them from the public. The factions at the top are prevented from open warfare because they have a common enemy, the general welfare. Thus, they are always willing to cooperate in order to maintain their position, even if it means one faction gains at some small expense to another faction.

Probably the most important man in the history of the Athenian democracy was Pericles, the first citizen of Athens, as Thucydides called him. He was a statesman and general of Athens during the time between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, which is usually called the Athenian golden age. He turned the Delian League, which was a federation of city-states, into an Athenian empire and led the fight against Sparta during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.

What is often overlooked about Pericles is that he is responsible for the structures we now associate with ancient Athens. He began the public works projects to beautify the city, including the building of the Parthenon. Most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, in fact, were the work of Pericles. It is possible that ancient Greece would have no hold on the western mind if not for those old ruins. What we think of when we think of ancient Athens is mostly from the time of Pericles.

Is there an analog to Pericles in the American narrative? The place to start would be Lincoln, who should be called the founder of America or possibly the re-founder or second founder. Lincoln destroyed the old republic and set the country off on the path of becoming a democracy. In one sentence, thirty words, Lincoln re-positioned the country to rest upon the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution and the history and debates that surrounded its creation.

The trouble is, Lincoln was not much of a democrat and he was no voice of the people, as was the case with Pericles. Lincoln really was not all that fond of the black people he was freeing from bondage. It is not clear that Lincoln fully understood the ramifications of his project. He certainly could not foresee his creation becoming first a continental empire then a global empire in less than a century. He may not have fully grasped the radicalism and ramifications that was contained in his Gettysburg speech.

That’s another important aspect of Pericles that is relevant to this age. He knew exactly what he was doing and he understood the nature of Athenian democracy. He was often accused of being a populist and a potential tyrant by the rich and powerful, because he so carefully courted the approval of the masses. Much of what he accomplished was in the face of resistance from what we would call the ruling classes of Athens. Pericles fully understood his projects and its significance.

Pericles was also committed to the general welfare. His first building project was the walls guarding the city of Athens. This had two consequences, in addition to protecting the city from attack. One is it put people to work. Rather than depending upon the generosity of the wealthy for such endeavors, the people could now count on the state to provide work on these projects. The other is it protected the poor in the city, but left the landed estates outside the city exposed.

The most obvious example of such a politician in American history would be Franklin Roosevelt, as he ushered in the federal public works project. It is easy to forget just how radical the Roosevelt administration was in America. The mobilization of the public in the face of the depression was unprecedented. For close to a century now, it is assumed that the federal government is responsible for the welfare of the people, rather than the states or powerful local interests.

Another interesting parallel between FDR and Pericles is that while both men were high born, from powerful families, they were opposed by the ruling classes. One of the great political dramas in golden age of Athens was the struggle between Thucydides, the leader of the conservative faction, not the historian, and Pericles over spending on projects like the Parthenon. Pericles outmaneuvered and outwitted Thucydides and the conservatives to win public approval for his projects.

Similarly, FDR faced a great deal of resistance to his projects. Factions in his own coalition objected to part of his program, while conservatives tried to bottle up his plans in the courts. Like the opposition to Pericles, the opposition to FDR was also keenly aware that there was a foreign policy element to the debate. The support for FDR’s domestic program was tied to support for his policies toward Europe. In fact, his domestic program was essential to his foreign policy.

Another possible candidate as the American Pericles would be the combined administration of Kennedy and Johnson. The space program is probably the closest thing America has to the Acropolis. The reforms of Johnson, which were largely created by the Kennedy people, haunt us to this day. Given the current unrest and the demographics of the country, it is not unreasonable to think that America will never escape the shadow of the Johnson administration.

Donald Trump, of course, could be the modern Pericles. He is not a great orator, but Trump has an uncanny ability to resonate with the public, both good and bad. He’s also a high-born man who sees himself as the defender of the public. No president has shown a greater concern for the general welfare since FDR. Unlike FDR, but like Pericles, Trump is faced with a ruling class committed to stopping him. As with Pericles, their opposition is strongly linked to foreign policy.

One other way to look at this is that in a democracy of any sort, the Pericles role is an essential one, as is the role of the oligarchs. Lacking the legal structures to balance between the natural factions in society, particularly the rich versus the general public, democracy evolves these roles in the form of charismatic politicians. Whenever the relationship between the people and their rulers gets out of balance, men step forward on behalf of both sides to reestablish an equilibrium

Of course, the other significance of the life of Pericles is that after his death, Athens was plagued by inferior men, inciting the worst habits in the public and only concerned with personal popularity. The inability of Athenian democracy to produce statesmen close to the quality of Pericles marked the end of the Golden Age of Athens and led to defeat at the hands of the Spartans. The run of politicians since FDR, with the exception of Reagan, is another useful parallel to consider.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Arc Of White

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One of the distinguishing features of politics in the American Empire is the phenomenon of white populism. This is something that emerged in the middle of the last century with the establishment of the American Empire after World War II. Every generation has experienced a wave of populist unrest, always in reaction to some reform movement initiated by the white elites. The elites act and the white working and middle classes react.

The first example of this was the white populist revolts in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960’s Cultural Revolution. Whites in the South reacted to the destruction of segregation. This was followed by a revolt by northern whites over things like forced busing and the cultural upheaval. This set off the great political realignment where southern whites and northern ethnics migrated from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party in the 60’s and 70’s.

Another white populist revolt started with the de-industrialization of the country starting in the 70’s and accelerating into the 80’s. The rapid conversion of the economy from manufacturing to retail and services continued the political realignment that started in the 60’s. The so-called Reagan Democrats were mostly the people who had voted for Nixon, but this time they moved the GOP for good. This was also the start of the gap between the knowledge economy and the labor economy.

The current crisis is another wave of white populism. This time it is in reaction to the continued looting of the middle-class economy by the global elites, but also the betrayals of the Bush years and the Kulturkampf of the Obama years. Large numbers of whites in American have come to the conclusion that the political and economic elites are at war with them. The election of Trump in 2016 is one obvious result, but the hysterical and now violent reaction of the elites is another.

The thing about these waves of white populism is they follow the same pattern; despite the fact the triggering events are different and the times are different. There are some obvious parallels between what is happening now and what happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but modern America is nothing like the America of the 60’s. In fact, the people of that age would not recognize this age as America. Despite the enormous differences in culture and demographics, the pattern is the same.

One aspect of every white populist spasm has been that it gets funneled into a form of legitimate politics. The conservative movement of Bill Buckley, for example, tapped into white populism in order to get professional conservatives into office. Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy was an explicit attempt to get disaffected white voters in the South to abandon their allegiance to the Democrat Party. Legitimate politics promised these voters a remedy to the assault on their culture.

The rise of Evangelical conservatism in the 70’s and 80’s was another effort to funnel white unrest into legitimate politics. Christians logically figured that if they organized politically, politicians would seek their vote. They would get the vote by addressing their concerns about things like abortion, family law and education. Of course, the Tea Party Movement and now the MAGA stuff are more efforts by whites to defend themselves through the legitimate political process.

Another thing all of these right-wing populist movements have in common is they failed to get anything for their efforts. Nixon did nothing to address the concerns of Southern whites over desegregation. He was happy to let them think he was on their side, but Nixon was more focused on gaining acceptance from official Washington. Reagan delivered for corporate interests and the military industrial complex, but never got around to doing anything for social conservatives.

Today we are seeing the same thing with Trump. His reelection depends entirely on whites coming out to vote for him for symbolic reasons. He will not deliver anything useful to white voters, but he will be a constant irritant to the elites. In fact, the only practical reason to vote for Trump in November is his reelection will send the elites into orbit and they could harm their own efforts. Otherwise, like Nixon and Reagan, Trump will deliver nothing for white populists.

The one new wrinkle to this process is that after the Cold War, many Republicans became hostile to white populists. The purging of the paleocons by the neocons in the 1990’s realigned the party away from populism. Most Republicans, for example, were openly hostile to the Tea Party movement. Trump’s biggest problem in Washington is his own party, which hates him as much as the Left hates him. So-called conservatives are fully onboard with multiculturalism now.

Of course, white populism has always had another outlet. That is the path of what can loosely be called white nationalism. In the 1960’s, people like George Lincoln Rockwell and William Pierce tried to tap into white populism to promote racial awareness among disaffected whites. Theirs was an anti-politics, in that it rejected the political system itself as illegitimate. Rather than try to mobilize people to elect better politicians, they wanted to organize people to create a new system.

In the case of Rockwell, it got nutty and then it got bloody. He tried selling Nazism to a country still proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII. The absurdity of his presentation got him plenty of attention, but that did more harm than good. He attracted a lot of weirdos and lunatics to his banner. He ended up taking two in the hat outside a laundromat, but even all these years later, the Left finds him to be a useful example to wave in front of bourgeois whites as a warning about white nationalism.

This is a pattern that has repeated in every spasm of white populism. The white nationalist lane is divided into one sober minded track and one eccentric and often dangerous track. William Pierce was a genuine intellect who understood the larger problems facing white people in America. He could never figure out how to break free of the eccentrics like Rockwell in order to attract a broader audience. The result was white nationalism became an insulated subculture.

This pattern repeated in the 1980’s. People like David Duke and Don Black came out of the Rockwell experience with the hope of breaking out of the white nationalism trap and addressing a general audience. Instead, Duke ended up being a less bizarre version of Rockwell and his movement was plagued by criminals and weirdos. After some national attention in the 1980’s, as well as some white nationalist violence, this phase of white nationalism faded into an insulated subculture.

In this current wave, the pattern has held. The alt-right started as a genuine populist revolt on-line among younger white males. The anonymity and irreverence of on-line culture gave them a way to express their unhappiness with modernity. The alt-right tapped into that, but like prior white nationalist spasms, this one was overrun by eccentrics and criminals. This time, the preppy airhead, Richard Spencer, was the clown prince used by the Left in their presentations.

As an aside, white nationalism in America has tracked the technological changes in the country over the last fifty years. The first iteration was banned from conventional media platforms, so it relied on things like newsletters and shortwave radio. The second iteration was the first to use the internet to build an on-line culture. Stormfront really was an innovation in political organizing. This last phase is confined to private internet channels, podcasts and live-streams.

Taken as a whole, the pattern is clear. These spasms of white populism in reaction to social experimentation by elites or changes in the economic order always end up going down two dead end paths. One is conventional politics, always through existing political channels, like the GOP. The other is white nationalism, which always ends up in a circus of attention seeking eccentrics, who are easily exploited by the Left. It is two roads that lead to the same dead end.

Interestingly, these two tracks always end up convinced that the other track is a dead end populated by losers. Today, many of the MAGA people invest as much time in rejecting the bad whites as they do supporting their cause. The remnants of the alt-right, in the name of white people, invest much of their time attacking white people, their history and their customs. Many of them sound anti-American to most people. Their rhetoric is decidedly leftist and hostile to American traditions.

The logical way out of this trap is something William Pierce recognized, but was never able to implement. That is, white populism needs to be channeled into a bourgeois politics that attracts high quality people who understand the problem is the system itself, rather than the office holders. In other words, it borrows the central insights of white nationalism, but provides it with a cultural and historical framework that appeals to the mass of middle-class white people.

Whether such a movement can get going is open to debate. The history of white populism is now a nightmare from which we cannot awake. Any effort to speak of white interests brings all of the usual suspects from past failed efforts into the mix. It’s as if all the parties enjoy playing the roles that have been created for them. The arc of white politics in America is looking like an immutable law of nature. It may require whites reaching minority status for the pattern to break.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Echo Chamber

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For generations now, the mass media has referred to itself as the echo chamber or the media echo chamber, at least with regards to politics. A favorite politician or pundit says something pithy or useful and the media repeats it verbatim until everyone is sick of hearing it. After the 2010 midterms, Barak Obama used the word “shellacked” as in his team was “shellacked”, and the media repeated it every hour for days as if it was wisdom sent down from the heavens.

This was an incite the Clinton crime syndicate figured out how to use to their advantage back in the 1990’s. They would come up with some slogan they wanted to get the media repeating. They would then have their mouth pieces repeat the line over and over in their media appearances. The media would get the hint and then start repeating the slogan over and over. What they essentially did is weaponize the natural conformity of the mass media and use it as a propaganda organ.

The best example of this is the Russian conspiracy stuff from 2016. For weeks DNC e-mails had been leaked on various forums. The media had been instructed to ignore them, but people were reading them anyway. Eventually, Team Clinton came up with the idea of blaming it on Russian hackers. They sent out someone to brief the press on the campaign plane. It was like she had a strange form of Tourette’s. She just kept saying “Russian hacking” like a lunatic.

The fact that it works says a lot of about this age. There are people in the media and in charge of the media operations that understand this ploy. You would think someone would call shenanigans on this once in a while, but it never happens. That’s because the handful of people who control these big media operations think it benefits their long-term project. The people working as reporters are just carny-folk now, willing to say and do anything to keep their acting gig.

Another way the media echo chamber is used to attack the well-being of the public is through the use of manufactured evidence and phony experts. The “gun show loophole” is a perfect example. There is no such thing as a gun show loophole in our gun laws, but the media repeats the lie, anyway. The reason is the Left supplies so-called experts to repeat the lie and wave around fake data in support of it. As a result, we have a label for something that does not actually exist.

The fictional threat of this moment is white supremacy, which no one bothers to define, but the media is sure exists. The echo chamber is regularly fed nonsense stuff like this from so-called think tanks. In the first sentence we see several obvious lies, but they will be echoed by the media. The expectation is that the Biden campaign will program their candidate to repeat some of this stuff, so the media will then repeat it for a few weeks after, to drive home the message.

This is not an accident. This particular scheme is a highly coordinated effort orchestrated by the usual suspects. Not only do we have Daniel Byman at Brookings, but there is his old friend Joshua Geltzer from the Obama administration, now working for a “New America.” Mentioned by Brookings as an expert in support of their claim is Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. She claims to be an expert in extremism, but presumably not extreme fitness, some other kinds of extremism.

Putting aside the obvious fact that none of the people behind the white supremacy propaganda campaign were altar boys, they also all have that weird obsession with Russia that keeps turning up. In this case, they are making the claim that the imaginary white supremacists are in league with the invisible army of Russian agents called the Russian Imperialist Movement. The absurdity of calling them white supremacist is apparently lost on these people.

Stand back and look at this as a whole and we have paranoia over white supremacy, which is entirely fictional. Then you have all the Russian conspiracy stuff, which is mostly fictional. Russia, like every country on earth, has an active interest in the empire, so they try to lobby for their interests. They are not bribing American politicians or planting listening devices outside the White House, but they have their espionage services like every country.

While the media echo chamber is useful in promoting the narrow interests of groups like the Clinton crime syndicate, it is highly susceptible to subversion by people with agendas at odds with the usual suspects. That’s the real reason behind these spasmodic efforts to censure right-wing voices. It is not hard for clever right-wing groups to use social media to meme their ideas into the echo chamber and have them rocket around the internet.

That is the weakness of the media echo chamber. It works when it appears to be organic and natural. If it looks contrived, it actually works against the people trying to influence the public. Leaving it open makes it more effective for the people in charge, but it also makes it useful for their opponents. Closing it off makes the tool useless to the owner, as well as the opponents. There is no middle ground that works for the usual suspects, but not for their enemies.

What this means is the efforts to censure the public square will become less overt in the coming years. Banning people and manipulating search results is too ham-fisted to work in the modern age. Instead, contrived terror campaigns like the “white supremacy” stuff or the Russia paranoia will become the norm. The echo chamber will be flooded with this stuff, in an effort to drown out dissent. The echo chamber is about to be a bell rung by the same people all day every day.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Turn Off, Tune Out And Drop Out

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Television is the great propaganda weapon of the liberal democratic state, so it is a useful window into the thinking of the oligarchs. Movies and television shows still have to attract an audience, so they are usually the trailing edge of whatever the oligarchs are trying to impose on society, but the ads are a different matter. They are the leading edge of the latest Progressive fads. They know people will not abandon a show or movie just because the ads are offensive.

That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.

This is why the ad makers were ready for the aggressive push to support the Black Lives Matter stuff after George Floyd died from an overdose. It is the thing that gets no attention, but should be the focus. Within days of the event, even before the rioters were in the streets, every global corporation was running diversity ads. The television services had all their blaxploitation films and shows ready. They even changed their graphical interfaces to feature black stuff.

It takes weeks and months to put together a simple ad. The concept has to be settled and the story boards created. Then there is filming, editing and final production. A corporate marketing program takes months to get ready. Changing the look and feel of the TV streaming service to feature blacks is no small feat. Creating a useful list of “black creators” should take a week or two, but they had it all ready to go. This pogrom was in the works for months.

In large part this is why Black Lives Matter initially had lots of white support, despite its record of murder and mayhem. Just four years ago BLM was executing cops, but thanks to a barrage of ads, most people forgot that and were initially inclined to support the cause. Then the black protesters reminded everyone why Africa is not the high point of human progress. The ad makers have now shifted the diversity message to feature homosexuals, deviants and girls playing male roles.

That’s really where you get a clear look into the mind of the oligarchs. This ad for the Marine Corp is getting revived in time for the election. When the ad was produced three years ago, the official line was that the Marines made the ad because they were facing pressure from women to let the girls go into combat units. That’s a lie, of course, as no women want to go into combat. Most men don’t want to see combat. Lying, however, is the core of advertising and the modern media.

The ad, of course, is disgusting. The thought of sending mothers and daughters into combat should make a decent person wretch. People at the edge of extinction turn their future into weapons of war. The ancients defined the barbarians, in part, by their habit of bringing their women and children to the battle. Of course, the absurdity of this little girl in combat is impossible to miss. Ad makers can normalize just about anything, but even they are bounded by reality.

You’ll note that the ad makers always use white women when they are trying to convince girls to be boys. Non-whites always get portrayed in traditional roles or they are cast as the natural leaders. The military ads always have the blacks in command positions or as the heroic example of the military code. That’s what they are selling to the non-whites they are targeting. Apparently, the oligarchs think they can patrol the empire with a Tinkerbell army run by 90-IQ officers.

Obviously, that will never happen. It does, however, reveal that these people are not geniuses who have carefully thought this through. They are caught up in nutty fads of their own creation, that sweep them along like flotsam. You see that with the response to the riots this summer. These idiot mayors, in places like Minneapolis and Portland, really thought they would be the heroes of these stories. They believed the agit-prop produced by the cult of social justice.

Even so, there are long term consequences to the culture war waged on the television screens of America. White males have been mostly removed from advertising, unless they are the fool or the supplicant. Blacks have been turned into objects of worship, largely due to television and advertising. This absurd sense of entitlement by blacks is one consequence. The negrophilia by many whites is another. It is not beyond the pale to use the term “ethnic cleansing” for what we are seeing.

At the peak of the 1960’s cultural revolution, Timothy Leary popularized the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” as a way to convince people to detach from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society. Of course, he was peddling degeneracy and self-abuse to whites, but the advice actually makes a lot of sense as an antidote to what the oligarchs are doing to us now. Disconnecting from the system as much as possible places you beyond the tractor beam of the propaganda organs.

This is the irony of this phase of the cultural revolution. What was initially pitched as a counter culture movement, was really a war on heritage America by the newly ascendant managerial class. The way to overthrow this decrepit and degenerate ruling class is to take their old advice. White people need to detach from the existing conventions and hierarchies that support the oligarchs. We need a counter culture that turns off, tunes out and eventually drops out.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Their Summer Of Discontent

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One of the stranger parts of the summer of left-wing violence is that no one has bothered to think too much about why the people are rioting. Sure, the official Left says it is an organic uprising over something or other. The official Right says these people are communists doing communisms. That’s the same old tired sloganeering we hear from the political class all the time. Neither claim gets to the question of why these people are out in the streets every night in certain cities.

Initially, the Black Lives Matter stuff was just the semi-organized Democratic Party street activism we have come to expect before an election. BLM was organized by the Obama administration on the college campuses. Then it bled into the legacy racial grievance rackets. The statue toppling after George Floyd overdosed in police custody was mostly paid for by the party trying to whip up black support. Then it gave way to the anarchy we are seeing in places like Seattle and Portland.

That’s an aspect that gets very little attention. The violence we are seeing is in mostly white cities by mostly white people. Minneapolis is 19% black. Seattle is 7% black and Portland is 6% black. Kenosha is 10% black and close to 80% white! Note that super-black cities like Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit have had no riots. Los Angeles, which just had a police shooting, could not get a decent riot going. They tried, but they lack the white kids with back packs needed to do it.

The truth behind these riots is that they have nothing to do with local issues or legitimate grievances. They are simply a happening that is drawing in the disaffected white youth that provides bodies for Antifa. Get up close to an Antifa crowd and what is striking is how unimpressive they are individually. The males are skinny and awkward, while the females are loud and ridiculous. These are young whites who have no place in the neo-liberal order, so they end up in Antifa.

What being in the anarchist underground gives them is the same thing you see in other types of anti-social subcultures. They get a sense of purpose, but also a community in which they have a clearly understood place. They go out and protests or riot with their mates and then have that to bond over afterward. It is not all that different from the hooliganism you see around European soccer. The difference is the Antifa kids come from the middle-class, rather than the working class.

Now, calling them kids is not entirely accurate. The guy who murdered the Trump fan in Portland is a middle-aged man. Still, he is a good example of a larger phenomenon that is fueling anarchism and also fueled the alt-right to some degree. This is a guy who has no place to go in life. There’s no role for a low-normal intelligence white guy with a taste for action. He’s probably too dumb for the military and there is no working-class community for him, so he drifted into anarchism.

The cities that are experiencing the anarchist unrest should be models for the modern liberal democratic order. They have very low crime. They are prosperous, bourgeois urban areas based on the new economy. The young people have access to college and jobs, while living in carefully curated hipster areas. Portland is what east coast cities aspire to, in terms of demographics and urban renewal. The whole point of gentrification has been to look more like Seattle than The Bronx.

The problem is these cities are entirely synthetic. Walk around hipster parts of these model cities and they seem very nice, but they also feel like the suburban town centers developers create for their housing developments. You can’t put your finger on it, but something is missing. Granted, visitors can’t truly judge these things, but the constant civil unrest by the younger people suggests they are not happy with the paradise in the wilderness either. Progressive Whitopia is not working.

Related is the flight out of places like San Francisco and New York. The plague is being blamed for it. The man-made panic shutting down these cities is forcing people to find greener pastures. Note, however, that the people who flocked to these urban oases for the culture, lifestyle and urban living are unwilling to fight for it. Instead of taking to the streets demanding more from their mayors, they are just packing the Subaru and heading for the suburbs. It was all fake and temporary for them.

What we may be seeing this summer has nothing to do with the tired clichés from the worn-out political establishment. Instead it is one of the consequences of trying to turn America into a Potemkin village. Replacing social capital with likes on social media and pointless employment in the new economy is not working. The generation that created it is committing suicide at record numbers. The generation that is faced with living it would rather watch it all burn than participate in it.

A truth of the human condition is men need purpose and fraternity. Maybe it is the military and family life. Maybe it is a frat at college and then a career. Maybe it is the job site and the local pub. Women need community and companionship. The nuclear family was created for them. The liberal democratic world order does none of these things for people. Living atomized, pointless lives among constantly shifting groups of strangers is a recipe for disaster, not paradise.

What’s now happening on the Left is a reflection of what has been happening in the white working and middle-classes. Progressive politicians cheer it on, because at some level, they wish they could be in the streets too. The mayor of Portland is living a pointless existence and he knows it. The difference is these anarchists get to express their unhappiness outside. Working class whites are ignored and the white middle class is threatened into remaining quiet.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Thoughts On Kenosha

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Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.

Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.

If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.

Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.

This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.

It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree. The good people of that city would have remembered the words of Jefferson and fertilized their tree of liberty. Of course, in a sane society, it would never have come to this. There would be no riots sponsored by the ruling class, so Kyle Rittenhouse would not have felt the need to go out in the streets. The reason all of this happened is the rulers made it happen.

As infuriating as it may be, it is this reality that must shine through. Those old rules you were taught about the law and your rights as an America no longer exist. They certainly don’t exist if you are white. If you are white, the system sees you as an enemy and will spare no expense in attacking you. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse sits in jail is no one told him this. Instead, internet warriors playing tough guy on-line encouraged him to be a man of action.

This is why people who like saying “well, at least he is doing something” need to be shouted down at every opportunity. These are people who think every cause needs martyrs, just as long as they are not the martyr, so they encourage everyone else to be foolishly brave. Like James Fields, we have another naive and impressionable young white man facing life in a cage, because he was convinced that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

This is just one aspect of a larger point that white people need to grasp. None of this would be happening if not for the political class. The Kenosha police department has tanks and armored vehicles. They have highly trained tactical units that are trained by Israel special forces officers. The Kenosha police force could invade a small country, but they are nowhere to be found during these riots. The reason they are absent is the politicians have ordered them to let the riots rage.

This is what makes Kenosha a pivot point in the ruling class revolt. This kid is not a scary monster who can be anathematized by the system. Even vulgarians like David Frum think he looks innocent. Note that Frum is okay giving weapons to these kids when they are killing Muslims on behalf of Israel, but otherwise he never wants to see white people holding firearms. For the typical white person, if he had a son, he would look like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Ultimately, that is now the significance of the Kenosha riots. White people are faced with the reality of their sons being sent to prison for the crime of being white. They face having their businesses destroyed because non-whites are ungrateful. They are being harassed at restaurants and in their home by mobs sponsored by the ruling class who have embraced anti-whiteness as a revolutionary cause. It’s no longer an abstract political argument. It’s daily reality.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The End Of The Beginning

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For months now, the more cynical have suggested the lock downs will continue into the fall, as the hysteria has become something of a religion. The facts on the ground are useful to the panic party in so far as they can be used to support the idea that this plague is a curse sent from nature because of Trump. They hope the self-inflicted suffering will purge the lands of orange come November. Word now comes that they plan to cancel college football this week.

There’s no public health reason for cancelling college sports this fall or for keeping the kids of campus, which many colleges are doing. Many colleges will be on-line only this fall, meaning it will be a full year of virtual learning for their students. It was not that long ago when these very same colleges said on-line learning was terrible. Students needed personal interaction with their teachers and fellow students. Like so much that comes from the Left, that was true only while it was useful.

As far as college football, the plan was to minimize attendance at the games and make sure the players were tested on a daily basis. The only thing missing from the regime was daily dips into vats of hand sanitizer. Despite it all, the people who run big time college sports have been bullied into shutting down. This should put to rest that the people behind this stuff are motivated by money or power. They are tossing away billions and their grip on millions of people’s attention.

Sport has always been a window into what lies behind the general culture. In this case, the plight of sport reflects what is happening in society as a whole. The efforts to restart professional baseball, basketball and hockey have been a disaster, because the stripped-down versions lack essential ingredients. Like everything else about a big complicated society, sport evolved over time to work a certain way. Rebooting it without essential elements like a live audience does not work.

The people running the NBA and NHL are a reflection of the people running the country as a whole. They have the problem all outsiders have, in that they see the parts of society and can navigate through them, but they can’t see the invisible bonds that hold those parts in relation to one another. Their scheme to restart their respective sports made sense to them on paper, but to the rest of us it is like trying to impose the metric system or soccer. It’s alien and weird.

There’s also the social aspect to the popularity of sports. Football became the dominant sport because it is the best television sport. It was the one thing people could talk about at the office with no problems. It’s why so many companies encouraged their people to sport the colors of the hometown team on casual Friday. The popularity of sports like football had as much to do with their place in the social fabric as their popularity as an entertainment product. Big time sports fill a social niche.

The people in charge predicted people were suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome and that the return of any sports would be a success. Instead, baseball, basketball and hockey are not drawing much interest. People moved on in the short time those sports were off the air. Football will most likely face the same fate if it goes dark this autumn. Sports passion is like a fire. It requires constant tending and fuel in order to keep burning. Once it goes out, it stays out.

What’s happening with sports also puts to bed the notion that the people in charge are playing 4-D chess in order to maintain their power. Keeping white people locked into sports watching was always about crowd control. Nowhere is egalitarianism and anti-racism sold harder to more white people than at a sporting event. It is the one place where multiculturalism appears to work. Take that away and normal white people are left to watch white radicals and black activists riot in the cities.

What lies ahead for sports entertainment, maybe all big-time entertainment, is what small business is facing right now. Every business has a cost structure that reflects its revenue stream. Seasonal business has seasonable const structures. Small business has low cost structures. Global sport has a cost structure that requires millions to spend billions every year. Suddenly, owning a big fancy sports arena is not such a great idea in a world where large gatherings are prohibited.

There is a general assumption that the Covid stuff comes to an end with either the defeat of Trump in November or one final tantrum in January if he wins. At that point, the practical reality of life will force this charade to come to an end. That’s true, most likely, for this phase of the process. Economic necessity will force the people in charge to relent or civil unrest will force it. Unless this is really a simulation and the base code has been altered, this cannot continue much longer.

That’s just the end of this phase. The breaking of the sports entertainment model will have far reaching consequences. Tens of millions of people will fill in the gaps left by tailgates, trips to the alma mater, weekend parties glued to the television and billions spent on sports entertainment. All of a sudden, the sort of liberal guy you used to talk to about the football team is not a guy you talk to at all. Instead of talking to the conservative guy about sports, you talk about other stuff.

Even the most basic human societies are a highly complex web of interpersonal relationships that operate within a hard to define thing we call culture. A big diverse country like America has a degree of complexity that we cannot comprehend, other than to have the wisdom to accept that reality. The people in charge have thrown sand in all the gears of the machinery, machinery that has allowed them to rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Sports will soon be the least of their problems.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Mask Madness

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The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

Meanwhile, out in the crowd, the partisans of the Left now feel emboldened to harass people on the streets about masks, distancing and so forth. Normal people, of course, are still stuck in the world of facts and reason, but they are adjusting to life in a past-sanity world. A similar pattern happened with homosexual marriage. Normal people still think it is ridiculous, just as they think men in sundresses is absurd, but they navigate around it and the crazies that support it.

Unlike homosexual marriage and drag queens, the petty tyranny has a moral signifier to it that makes it tougher to navigate. The mask is the most obvious one. Spend time in a public setting and you can see the believers versus the compliant. The believers make sure their face muffler is firmly attached and is clean and new. They make sure it is on before they leave the car and they wear it all the way to the car. Normal people stick theirs on just before they enter a store.

The same is true of other aspects of this performance. At places that offer hand sanitizer, the faithful queue up, making sure to keep their distance, then make a big show of rubbing themselves down with sanitizer. Normals feel pressured to do it, but they look a bit out of place. It’s like the C&E Catholics taking communion. They just assume everyone knows they are going through the motions. Others, of course, just ignore it and go about their business.

What makes all of this more compelling, from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is no one knows if these measures have any impact. The people who say they are effective almost always have no math or science. They would not know the first step in thinking about how to test the effectiveness of these measures. The other side of the debate does not exist, at least not publicly. Those strongly opposed to these measures base their arguments in the law, not science.

The truth is, there is no reason to think any of these measures have a positive impact on the progress of the pandemic. That’s the first important thing to know if you want to think about a pandemic. It is a process. Assuming the new bug is not 100% lethal to those exposed and humans can develop an immunity to it over time, a pandemic follows a predictable pattern. There is the initial outbreak, where the most vulnerable succumb, then it spreads through the population and eventually burns out.

A pandemic burns out because eventually there is a critical mass of people who are immune to the virus. Maybe they have a natural immunity or they have developed one, but over time, the ability of the virus to find a new host diminishes and it can no longer spread to new victims. Of course, in the extreme, the virus just kills all those vulnerable to it and the rest survive. Some researchers think this could have happened in Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu outbreak.

The theory behind these counter measures was to slow the spread, so hospitals would have time to gear up for patients. The fact that the spread was not impeded in the slightest is a pretty good real-world test of the measures. Maybe in theory they could work, but we don’t live in theory. In reality, months of social distancing and mask wearing have had no impact on the course of the disease. In fact, in places like New York, their policies probably made it worse.

It is possible that all of these measures are bad idea. Take the mandatory mask wearing business as an example. Wearing a surgical mask in a medial setting as part of a protocol to maintain a germ-free environment is well established. Hospitals have very lengthy procedures for the staff, as well as regular training by people who are tasked with maintaining a clean environment. The mask is just one small part of a larger process to maintain a safe environment in the hospital.

In the regular world, where no such procedures are in place and no one is trained in the proper use of masks, or even using proper masks, the mask may be a bad idea. If you watch people in the wild, they are endlessly fiddling with their masks. We know a primary vector for a virus is people touching their face and eyes. A policy that increasing face touching is not a good idea in a pandemic. In other words, mask wearing may increase the spread of the virus in the real world.

The efficacy of mask wearing does not matter, as it is now just another amulet people can wear in public to express their adherence to a particular cult. In the case of the scolds yelling at people about their masks, they believe their mask loyalty is a license to harass the world. Social misfits at the bottom of the social hierarchy now use the mask issue to attack the normal people for not liking the mask policy. The mask is now just another part of the general madness of this age.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Sports Entertainment

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Last week, the Wisconsin athletic director sent out a letter to supporters that the university would lose 60-70 million dollars this year due to the reduction in football games being played in the fall. If the season is cancelled, the losses will top 100 million just for the fall. That may be an exaggeration, but there is no question that a cancellation of the college football season will cost the big-time college programs tens of millions in revenue. It is a billion-dollar industry.

ZeroHedge pointed out that ESPN has a billion dollars in ad space to sell for this fall’s college football season. They also have ad space for other sports as well, but college football is the prime mover of ad space. It is unlikely that ad buyers will want to buy ads when ESPN is running replays of card games this fall. ESPN’s primary income stream is mandatory cable fees, they net close to nine billion in fees every year, but a billion dollars in ad revenue still counts for something.

Of course, everyone knows no one is watching ESPN at the moment, but that has no impact on the cable fees. The way it works is a service like Hulu of Comcast pays ESPN nine dollars per month for each subscriber to their service. These deals are not contingent on viewership. As ZeroHedge points out, the language in these deals does not require the content provider to deliver particular content. As long as ESPN is beaming something, they get paid for it.

Even so, the mass disruption of sports is going to have an impact on the economic model of professional sports. Out of work people will begin to look at that cable bill and wonder if it makes sense. Cable providers will begin to look for ways to get out from under their ESPN deal. For its part, ESPN will not be paying the leagues for content when the leagues are shutdown. Like the economy as a whole, professional sport is about to experience an unprecedented jolt.

Way back when the lock downs were on the table, the sober minded warned that you can’t lock everyone in their homes and not have consequences. The modern economy is a highly complicated balancing act that has evolved to produce increasingly efficiency, along with the retail excess. Even small disruptions can upset the balance within supply chains resulting in unexpected outcomes. Start turning off large bits of it and before long the whole thing starts to crash.

The first glimpse of this may be what is happening with sports. Major League Baseball is the first to re-open, but it is quickly becoming a disaster. The empty parks make the television product less than compelling and now games are being cancelled as players test positive for the virus. The NBA is struggling to keeps its knuckleheads inside the compound where they plan to play their games. The NFL is seeing droves of players sit out the upcoming season for fear of the virus.

The thing no one dares mention is the impact this lock down is having on interest in spectator sports. Being a sports fan is like being a smoker. Part of the dependency is the ritual and structure of it. The smoker takes a break every hour to smoke, collect his thoughts and get the nicotine hit. The football fan has their weekend in the fall, where they have scheduled social activities around games. Like the smoker, the sports fan builds their life around the habit.

People who quit a vice like smoking or drinking note that they also quit the social scene that goes with it. They lose touch with Sally from accounting who they used to take smoke breaks with every day. The people at the bar are no longer a part of their life. That’s what will happen with sports. Those weekends in the fall will be filled with other things and after the withdrawal pains subside, the habit will be lost. People who cut cable know this experience. In time, you don’t miss it.

This is not idle speculation. It has been known for a long time in the sports world that the recovery time after a work stoppage is very long. When a sports league shuts down due to labor strife, it takes years for the fans to return. It’s not because they are mad at the greedy players and owners. The fans simply find other things to do with their time and many of them drift away entirely. Millions have probably broken the habit already and that is before the hate whitey lectures were added.

There is one final piece to this puzzle. The growth of sports entertainment has tracked the arc of the Baby Boom generation. Look at attendance figures for sports in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before Boomers were dominating the market. Ball parks rarely sold out and the audience for televised product was limited. In the 1980’s as the Boomers took over the marketplace, sports boomed. When they could play tennis, professional tennis was huge. Then it was golf that had a boom.

The fact is, the sports entertainment model was built for and on the Baby Boomer generation, which is now entering its power down cycle. Boomers are retiring and that means down-sizing their lives. The major sports leagues are facing a demographic reality that cannot be overcome with happy talk about diversity. Non-whites don’t spend like whites and they cannot sustain an economic model built for whites. What happened to California is what is coming for sports entertainment.

This demographic cliff has been known to the sports leagues for a long time, which is why they happily throw in with the hate-whitey stuff. Sure, many of the principles really do hate white people, but much of it driven by the carnival barker’s belief in his ability to will an audience into existence. They really do think they can cast the same spell on the brown hordes that they cast on white people and get the same result. The virus panic and cultural revolution will put those theories to the test.

It is hard to see how the old sports entertainment model survives the current crisis. That doe not mean these leagues fold or that sports entertainment dies out. It’s just that the old model was built for an old America, one that no longer exists. On the other hand, sports entertainment has been a vital part of keeping whitey under control. Something will have to be done to reestablish the mind control device known as sportsball. Perhaps part of woke America will be mandatory sports watching by recalcitrant whites.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!